Spotify's Sean Parker has learned a thing or two about teamwork since his days as Facebook's founding president and Napster's co-founder. For one thing, he knows now that people don't build bridges – teams do – and those bridges lead us into the future. Thus, for the third year running, Parker's Founders Fund has fueled the TechFellow Awards, a forward-thinking investment program in which the recipients' rewards are actually the opportunity to award funding to the "real winners" – selected startups.

Here's how it works: A selection committee awards 20 luminaries $100,000 grants to invest in startups of their choice. Past winners have invested in such promising enterprises as Flipboard and Quora, while last year's winners included Path CEO Dave Morin. The awards ceremony, which was held on Tuesday night at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco (SFMOMA), featured a speech by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and was hosted by Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning actor Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory). With celebrities such as Goldie Hawn in attendance, the TechFellow Awards is trying to position itself as the Oscars of Silicon Valley.

"I just don't think there's been any forum in Silicon Valley to recognize the innovators behind the innovators," Parker told Rolling Stone after the ceremonies. "There's this huge number of innovative companies, that have touched literally billions of people, coming out of this area and unlike Hollywood films where there are all sorts of awards shows and credits roll at the end of the film .... there's been nothing like that in Silicon Valley, mysteriously. Despite the fact that the overall impact on the global economy generated by Silicon Valley companies is vastly greater than the economic impact of Hollywood. We know who the poster children are. We know who the faces are, the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Jeff Bezoses – but behind all of those CEOs, there are a huge number of people that are responsible for much of the innovation that these companies are known for."

As for what Parker is most known for these days – Spotify – the young entrepreneur says it's doing just fine, thank you. "It's going extremely well," he says. "The Facebook integration has been a huge success and it's been driving millions and millions of users. The monetization is going extremely well, in that the conversion rates have actually been increasing; more and more people are subscribing so that they can access their content on whatever mobile device they happen to carry. And that model of paying for portability and accessibility and convenience is actually proving itself, I think, to be the winning model in music."

And the winners of the 2011 TechFellow Awards are:

General ManagementJoe Greenstein, founder and CEO of FlixsterHeather Harde, former CEO of TechCrunchAndrew Siegel, SVP, Strategy and Corporate Development of Conde NastClara Shih, CEO of HearsayVictoria Ransom, founder & CEO of Wildfire Interactive

Disruptive InnovationDiego Berdakin, co-founder and President of BeachMintMarco Arment, creator of InstapaperLeilah Janah, founder and CEO of SamasourceMatthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlarePerry Chen, co-founder and CEO of KickstarterTom Preston-Werner, co-founder and CTO, Github